


That Which Should Not Be

by follyofyouth



Category: XCOM (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Body Horror, Character Death, Community: spook_me, Gen, Happy halloween, The lost, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 16:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16432634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follyofyouth/pseuds/follyofyouth
Summary: You look down at your hands one day and find they are not your own.





	That Which Should Not Be

You look down at your hands one day and find they are not your own.

This, you know, is the beginning.

—

Like a prion, they had said. Naegleria fowleri. Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Fancy names for agonizing ends.

But this is no prion. This is no pretty name in sweet warm waters, no avoidable menace encased in the skull of another.

There is no rescue coming.

—

The reports had been sporadic at first. You’d chalked it up to fear mongering and told your mother not to worry.

You had weathered so much; you would weather this, too.

But the stories became more regular, both in frequency and in detail: a grim reminder of your powerlessness.

Aliens had come and Earth had fallen. The dead rot in the street or are shoveled off into mass graves.  
  
Nothing you shouldn’t have expected, really. You’d always thought Star Trek was too rosy-eyed.

Live long and prosper? Bullshit.

—

No, this is not a prion. You don’t know what it is, but you are certain of that. A prion consumes, yes, but not like this. Not in this way.

You see it for yourself first in the courier, a scrawny thing cut loose from a few blocks down — some kind of Typhoid Mary, you suspect, though you have no evidence to prove it.

The world has ended and you are afraid; it is all the proof you need.

The woman in 5B says he looks like her son, the son she loves, the son she lost. She hadn’t lost him to the war, of course. Not directly.

He’d simply vanished at First Contact, but she’d kept blurry photos a friend had sent her, insisting that the pixelated figure without a discernible face was her little boy.

All you can make out is a red bandana over the figure’s face.

You are certain it’s a false hope, but you keep the thought to yourself.

—

You have always believed a battle in which you do not know the enemy is one you cannot win.

A few other souls help you tie the poor bastard down, feed him and water him as the disease wracks his body.

You’d thought you were better than this. You’d thought you‘d have compassion for the sick, for the dying, for the man screaming in pain in the basement.

But the sight of him fills you with fear and you know: he cannot be allowed to live whatever life he has remaining in him.

You turn the music up loud, louder, loudest, and wit for the drums, the solo your father always said would leave you deaf if you kept listening to it so loud, _don’t you know the neighbors can hear?_

You’d thought he’d been exaggerating, but with how perfectly it covers the shotgun blast, you’re not really sure anymore.

The bodily is limp and wet and warm as you carry it down the street towards the river. Your clothes are soaked in blood and viscera; you throw the into the weighted garbage bag too, changing into the spare pair you’d brought along.

At least this way, the hungry will not find him.

\--

You think it will quiet down.

You have handled the problem, disposed of it.

It keeps coming.

The pod appears in front of the building three months, two weeks, and six days after the start of the Invasion, its noxious green gas curling up into the early morning fog.

This, you concede, is a problem.

You dig out dad’s gas mask and hope it is enough.

You tell yourself he would be proud, but you wish he were here to say it himself.

The gas spews up and up as you try to budge it, rallying the couple in 3c — the only ones left with fuel in their truck.

Nothing.

Your cousin manages to trade for dynamite, but won’t tell you what she used for such a prize. Her aim is good and the boom terrific, but still, the gas pours forth.

You yell and scream and plead, but it remains unmoved and unmoving.

Your mother will not leave.

\--

There are so few of the others left, and you are so hungry. There has been no food in the stores for months, and you have picked the neighborhood clean. The little garden your aunt planted has rotted, the leaves turning a sickly yellow and the fruit a putrid black.

Mr. Hendricks ate one and died frothing at the mouth; you haven’t forgotten the noises he’d offered up as his final testament, somewhere between a choke and a scream.

You wonder what happened to the bastards who made a meal of him.

At night, you lie awake and dream of the world that was, the bakery down the block and the bodega around the corner.

The owners had been kind people, always a warm smile and an extra treat. When they’d found you sobbing at the dairy case, the weight of it all too much, much too much, they’d given you tissues and let you dry your eyes, set you back on your way with an ice cream bar and a few more groceries than you should have been able to afford.

They’d been killed in the initial riots, their bodies trodden over and left to rot.

You don’t believe —weren’t raised believing—but you hope they are somewhere better.

\--

Grey skin and glowing eyes. This is not what scares you.

It’s the slow and subtle obliteration of the self.

\--

Your mother says her hands are not her own, and you ask whose they would be _but_ hers. When she opens her mouth, it is not words that come out, but a jumble.

Her eyes go wide.

The neighbors knock at the door, but you will not let them in, will not let them have her.

Her skin grows more grey by the day and her eyes have begun to yellow, but still, you talk, writing little notes to one another on scraps of paper.  
  
Each day, it takes her a little longer to remember where she is, who she is. She cannot help you tend your wounds; she cannot tend to hers, the cracks opening along dry and flaking skin.

She lies helpless on the living room floor, her eyes slowly losing their focus.

Eventually, she begins to scream.

Eventually, she does not stop.

The neighbors grow evermore insistent.

\--

She lunges at you with a strength and a speed your mother never had, tears at your back with fingernails longer and sharper than you ever remember.

You do not know where you’ll go, but you know you can’t stay.

You can’t be here.

Not for what’s coming.

\--

You knew this part of town once upon a time, walked it without thinking, the weight of your backpack steady on your shoulders and music in your ears.

But your landmarks are gone and the streets pocked with craters and the landscape is as alien to you as the little grey men with the too large eyes.

In class, you’d begun to design your own experiments, a hands-on, down and dirty approach to understanding _how_ science and _why_ science — some new initiative. You hadn’t minded, but finding a question had been harder than you’d expected.

You have one now: what happens to a human body exposed to an alien pathogen?

Your method is, you admit, imperfect. You will only have one trial and you failed to take good notes on those that had come before. You’d watched, yes, but you had not observed. You hadn’t taken data.

You’d become so transfixed by the horror before you that you’d forgotten to ask good questions or make good guesses.

Well, you weren’t going to ace this quarter anyway.

\--

It settles in your knees, a kind of aching stiffness that makes it hard to move. You notice it in your shoulders next, and then your elbows, making your backpack agonizing, even as the supplies in it dwindle ever downward.

There have been rumors, though, things you’d heard along the grapevine before you’d left, stories of those who had settled out among the scrublands and the waste. They’d carved something out, found a way to hold strong.

They’re staving all the same, you’ve heard, but there’s chatter they’ve found an ambitious plan to address the issue, even if the thought of it makes your empty stomach turn sour.

Your mouth waters all the same.

You find the train tracks and follow them out, stumbling as you go.

\--

It moves next to your spine, a searing stiffness that forces you to leave your now tattered bookbag dangling in a bush.

Still, you press on.

There is a rage bubbling in you, an urge that seethes and burns. It carries you, forces your feet ever onward, even when you want desperately to rest, even as your blisters pop and your feet bleed.

It carries you.

You are not sure, however, where this rage is from. There is plenty to be angry about, of course, but there has _always_ been plenty to be angry about —such is the nature of “poverty in America,” as they call it.

You think that’s a cheap cop out, a glossy phrase to ignore a dead father and a mother who works ninety hour weeks; a coward’s way to gloss over the phone ringing, demands from those who want what they’re owed, bills piling up while your mother buries her face in her hands and juggles the numbers, your neighbors coming by to spare what groceries they can.  
  
It was a rage that kept you going, that propelled you to do more, to take on the load where you felt she could not.

But it is not the rage you feel now.

And it is not the rage you should feel, your world in ruins around you. By the day, that grows harder to access, more alien to you in feeling. What had once been a knot of poison is now a faint memory, one that grows more distant by the minute — so much like the rest of your life.

You cannot see, cannot recognize that the disease has finally reached its target.

\--

You look down at your hands one day and find they are not your own.

None of your body is.  
  
It’s wrong, _wrong_ , all wrong. It’s dry and flaky, rife the kind of sickly gray pallor that living tissue cannot support.

And then you see it, that which should not be, the faint green glow coursing along your veins.

And, like your mother before you, you open your mouth and scream.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Spook_Me 2018 on Dreamwidth. Turning into a Lost is a nasty business, kids.
> 
> Come find me as troublewillfindme on DW!


End file.
